Having trouble sleeping? Want to get the kids to bed?
i. Musical Features that Aid Sleep
The paper identifies musical features (e.g., legato articulation, medium tempo, lyrics) that aid sleep.
Dickson, G. T., & Schubert, E. (2020).
Musicae Scientiae, 26(3), 497–515.
DOI: 10.1177/1029864920972161
ii. Self-reported Reasons for Listening to Music for Sleep
Explores psychological mechanisms (e.g., relaxation, distraction) behind music use for sleep.
Dickson, G. T., & Schubert, E. (2020).
Music and Medicine, 12(3), 188–191.
DOI: 10.47513/mmd.v12i3.730
iii. Relaxing music to help you sleep by Ben Knight
Summarizes Dickson’s findings for a general audience.
iv. Sleep Through Surveyed: Usage and Efficacy of Streamed Soundscapes
Weng, L.; Hulbert, A.; Gibbs, E.; Schubert, E. (2021).
Sound and Music Computing Conference Proceedings, pp. 253–260.
Evaluates effectiveness of streamed soundscapes for infant sleep.
The study investigates the usage patterns and perceived effectiveness of streamed soundscapes designed to help infants sleep. These soundscapes were part of the ABC Kids Listen “Sleep Through” series, curated by one of Australia’s leading sonic artists, Adam Hulbert. See, for example, his work in ABC Kids Listen – Sleep Through Series consisting of Ambient soundscapes designed to help children sleep, commissioned by ABC Kids Listen.
V. Six new ways to get a good night’s sleep. By Katharine Rogers on ABC Kids listen, which includes a summary of a report by Isabella Mazzarolo.
VI. Infant Sleep through Noise and Music. The full report by Isabella Mazzarolo
VII. Music and Sleep (BoLive interview)
English version of an interview with Emery Schubert on music and sleep by Camilla Fiz on 18/8/2025 for the magazine, BoLive [link pending] focussing particularly on research he did with Thomas Dickson.
- Which are the main features of a successful sleep song? How come do they affect relaxation?
Low frequencies, moderate tempo and light percussion are the musical features associated with facilitating sleep. Using music one likes also matters, as you note, below.
- Do personal preferences in music genre play a role in this?
One of the novel aspects of our work is that preference plays a major role. Without considering preference, listening to music could even be a frustrating experience, inhibiting sleep.
- In this study of you and Dickson, it emerges that the formation of a habit concerning listening music also contributes to its positive effect. I guess this is shared by is other exercises (e.g. listening audiobook), but still music appears to be more effective. In that paper, you wrote it’s a kind of mystery. Has there been any new evidence in the last years?
There are several mysteries remaining about music’s magical properties! Researchers and theorists continue to work and refine this question. There is still a lot of magic about music that makes researching it so interesting and important.
- Otherwise, do you have an opinion about that? Could it be the combination of habits and special rhythms, beats and so on, that makes music so powerful?
We need to have specially designed studies to test this. I don’t know of anyone who has done this yet (and that’s why it’s important that we maintain dialog with people like you). Replication is also really important. The study that you refer to, above, is like a replication because several studies were examined. But we were mystified by the result, and that’s why further, carefully designed research is needed to tease apart whether habit formation + which other factors—provide the best possible explanation, and how those explanations can be applied.
- According to the current evidence, what kind of sleep disorders can music help to improve? Instead, in which cases should medications be considered?
On the one hand we cannot claim that music should replace medication for all sleep disorders. That would depend on a number of factors. We know that people ‘self-medicate’ music to help them sleep (with one estimate of a study by us, from 2020, of 84%!), but even if such self-help is unsuccessful it does not get bad press because the chances of music causing harm is minimal. Using pharmaceutical treatments, on the other hand, has been shown to have potential side effects. The tricky thing is that—if music can take time to have an impact on improving sleep, and it does not work for all particular individuals—the self-prescribing individual needs to know when to turn to more conventional approaches. This is why more work in the area of music and sleep is needed.
- May you recommend a few tricks to help an average poor sleeper? For instance, when and how listening music, what genre and how long it might take to see any results.
There are so many diverse reasons people have reported for successful use of music to aid sleep, and given the nascent state of systematic research in the area, it is difficult to give a simple answer. Our research suggests that the impact of music on sleep should be seen immediately, although the effect might be small at the beginning — this means that for the first few days the music might not appear to make a difference. But, say, for example, that having music at night before going to sleep makes the individual look forward to going to bed, and doing so at a regular, planned time, it will be much easier to start forming the new habit of the night time sleep routine. It is worth noting that other people are doing some important work in this area, included Kira Vibe Jespersen and researchers in the UK, China and Korea (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/authors?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0206531, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neurology/articles/10.3389/fneur.2024.1433592/full)